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and was wondering if there is a similar list here for Windows 2000? I've already found such a list at Microsoft site, but its very outdated, and does not seem to mention any AMD chipsets. I've been told that the key to finding boards that support any legacy OS is through the southbridge chipsets.

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but in case of Windows 2000 (thanks to BlackWingCat's unofficial drivers) it should be actually possible to support probably all of the current mainboards. Of course there may be problems with peripherals such as integrated HD Audio, LAN, etc. but in case of main chipsets and graphics (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) there should be no problems with finding drivers.

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Since a quick search didn't reveal any answer to this, could you confirm that the statement above applies to the new (a-series FM1 and AM3+) motherboards as well as the earlier AMx ones? The Web sites for at least some FM1 boards don't seem to include drivers for anything prior to XP (nor does the AMD site), and for an integrated GPU one might expect drivers beyond what's available in the Win2K distribution to be required.

Thanks.

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I've just bought ASRock A55 Pro3 (FM1, AMD A55 chipset) and Windows 2000 works flawlessly. I haven't tried the integrated graphics though as I'm using an external one. I think BWC unofficial drivers should work for it nevertheless. As for the SATA drivers, BWC unofficial ones work fine.

On the other hand, SATA3 and USB3.0 drivers don't work but these are not from AMD (A55 chipset doesn't have SATA3/USB3.0 so there are other controllers installed on the board).

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I've just bought ASRock A55 Pro3 (FM1, AMD A55 chipset) and Windows 2000 works flawlessly. I haven't tried the integrated graphics though as I'm using an external one. I think BWC unofficial drivers should work for it nevertheless. As for the SATA drivers, BWC unofficial ones work fine.

On the other hand, SATA3 and USB3.0 drivers don't work but these are not from AMD (A55 chipset doesn't have SATA3/USB3.0 so there are other controllers installed on the board).

Thank you, maybe FM2 will work too. USB3 driver doesn't work, but AM3 USB3 wasn't BIOS bootable, so not very useful. Also when I connect HDMI cable Win2k crashes, not sure if the problem is with BWC's driver.

I just purchased a very inexpensive Socket AM3 board (mostly to have a spare) - the first MB I've bought in a long time that wasn't nVidia-based but rather on AMD 770 / AMD SB710 - an ECS IC780M-A2 (V1.0A). The Win2K installation seemed to go fine, but when I attempted to install the nVidia 197.45 graphics driver for the GIGABYTE GV-N210SL-1GI GeForce 210 it claimed that no suitable video card was present (I had just successfully installed this driver for that card on a Win2K installation on another MB, so this was unexpected).

At that point I thought I'd better install the chipset drivers (which I'd casually tried to from the MB install CD, but which had failed). Turned out that while the overall CD installation failed each individual driver (chipset, LAN, and sound - apparently all that were present, given that on a subsequent XP installation it only listed those three options in the overall install menu) happily installed on Win2K and in fact seemed to indicate that they were intended to (so there seemed no need to explore, say, BlackWingCat's drivers). But still the 197.45 nVidia driver claimed that no suitable card was present.

I then discovered that the adapter support (from Display properties) was Vgasave (which I'd never encountered before), with no option to update the driver to something else. In fact, Device Manager didn't list ANY display adapter as being present. Hmmmm.

Just in case it was the video card itself (though it had just been working in the other machine) I swapped it out for an old GeForce6200LE and redid the Win2K installation from scratch. Same result, even though the 6200LE's support CD appeared to install successfully rather than complained that it couldn't see the card as the 197.45 driver had.

I was beginning to think that the problem must be with the MB, but figured I should try an XP installation to check. While the basic install still left me with Vgasave in Display Properties and no adapter at all in Device Manager, when I installed the 6200LE's support CD, lo and behold, the Display Adapter appeared and all seemed well: apparently, despite the fact that the card's support CD claimed to support both Win2K and XP, something in the nature of the support (or possibly something which the MB's install CD quietly installed from the top-level installation, which wouldn't run on Win2K) was sufficiently different to resolve the problem on XP. Just to complete the process I installed Win7, and in that case the basic install recognized the 6200LE right off with no need to install a driver independently.

I looked around here for discussions about installing Win2K on boards with AMD chipsets (e.g., ) but found nothing that seemed to shed any light on this (which seemed a bit strange, given the number of different MBs people here have tried Win2K on). Am I overlooking something obvious, or does this at least ring a faint bell with someone?

Thanks for any insights you may have.

Edit: One more thing I did try was choosing 'Enable VGA mode' in the F8 boot menu, a suggestion I found somewhere while trying to investigate this. Still no joy, though.

Edited May 31, 2012 by billtodd

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I think you should at least try install BlackWingCat drivers. Those official installers from Nvidia are really bad... the drivers often don't install on Win2k even though they say the system is supported. On my previous mainboard I had to install everything from Device Manager because the Nvidia installer didn't install anything at all (although it kept saying that "the installation completed successfully").

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I think you should at least try install BlackWingCat drivers. Those official installers from Nvidia are really bad... the drivers often don't install on Win2k even though they say the system is supported. On my previous mainboard I had to install everything from Device Manager because the Nvidia installer didn't install anything at all (although it kept saying that "the installation completed successfully").

Thanks for the speedy response - but I'm not sure which BlackWingCat drivers you're referring to.

As I noted, the chipset drivers on the board's installation CD appeared to install just fine on Win2K (including a top-of-the-screen title indicating that they were installing for Win2K, not something later), and the driver file dates are 2007, which is I think later than anything that the Win2K installation (basic HFSLIP 1.7.9) would have provided during the Win2K install. Unless the board's installation CD's top-level autorun.exe facility (which does run on XP but not on Win2K) installs something extra that it doesn't mention in its menu (which includes only entries for chipset, LAN, and sound) it certainly looks as if chipset support for Win2K is successfully installed.

The GeForce 210 197.45 nVidia driver installed successfully on another board running Win2K (and I'm not sure how much farther back I could go and still get support for that card), as did the GeForce 6200LE driver from that card's install CD (and it installed successfully from the same CD directory on the new board for XP, though I suppose the setup.exe activity may have used different material from that directory). Unlike the 197.45 driver, the 6200LE driver doesn't complain that no suitable card is present and appears to install successfully on Win2K, but (unlike on XP) does not then make the Display Adapter appear (with appropriate support) in Device Manager.

There seems to be something different about this chipset (unless there's just something wrong with the board) that doesn't bother Win7 and that XP manages to work around (at least in the case of the 6200LE) better than Win2K does. The base installations of Win2K and XP (unlike Win7) don't even SEE the display adapter (instead using Vgasave to provide basic display functions). After the base installation Device Manager doesn't see any Display Adapter either (so I couldn't follow your suggestion to install in that manner on Win2K). Later requests to detect new hardware don't find it either.

I'm game to install any BlackWingCat drivers that you think might help. I didn't bother with the AHCI driver because a) it didn't seem applicable to this problem and B) the board's chipset drivers seemed to install OK. I'm not sufficiently familiar with BWC's extensive work to know what other drivers might be worth a shot, so would appreciate any pointers you can provide.

Speccy (1.06, apparently the last version to support Win2K) can't see the 6200LE at all (nor the on-board audio hardware, for which I didn't bother installing the driver this time around). Perhaps it can only see devices that have a driver installed - its only entry under 'graphics' is the generic Vgasave support.

UnknownDeviceIdentifier found both the 6200LE and the on-board audio hardware, with a red background for both (perhaps its way of saying that no driver is present, but at least it can see the card - only the fact that Win7 could also see it during its installation kept me from worrying that the PCI-e slot was somehow defective).

Device Manager still doesn't list any Display Adapter (thought I'd better check to make sure nothing had changed there, especially after UDI found the card).

BlackWingCat's version of nVidia's 197.45 driver (with the 6200LE installed) issued the same message that nVidia's did with the GeForce 210 installed: no hardware found that matched the driver, so it just refused to install the driver. I'm curious in what way BWC's driver differs from nVidia's, given that the latter does say it supports Win2K and certainly appeared to when I installed it in another Win2K system.

Tried what was apparently BWC's version of 266.58. It installed suspiciously quickly and was identified in Add/Remove Programs as NVIDIA PhysX, but made no other difference (no appearance of any Display Adapter in Device Manager nor of any video facilities beyond the 800x600 provided by Vgasave).

A much smaller BWC file has the file name nvw2k26658d.zip but identifies itself internally as 256.00. I couldn't try that as specified because it requires installation via the Device Manager update driver mechanism (which, of course, only exists for a device present in Device Manager), but I did right-click to let me try the 'install' option for its .inf file - to no avail.

I've been fumbling around (so far without success) attempting to modify the board's install DVD's content sufficiently to get the top-level autorun.exe to run on Win2K as it did on XP, but keep thinking that I must be missing something which either is obvious or at least is well-known to people who have been using these AMD chipsets with Win2K for the past few years. There are a few suspicious directories outside the main chipset install directory that contain 'vga' subdirectories, but so far they seem related to ATI-specific video support (i.e., to other boards that have it or are using ATI cards) and while I've tried running all their setup.exe files (and installing the occasional .inf) wherever they remotely seemed possibly relevant that hasn't helped.

If I didn't have the strong suspicion that Win2K WILL run on this board and use the PCI-e graphics cards as it should (since XP does even though it initially exhibits the same blindness to the video cards that Win2K does) I'd be far more willing just to give up the idea. Grrr.

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Have you tried enabling the "View -> Show hidden devices" in Device Manager?

No, and it was certainly a reasonable idea - but it turns out that nothing useful appears when you show hidden devices either (nor does it on XP before the driver has been installed and magically caused the Display Adapter to appear in DM).

So for this particular board XP and Win2K act the same (not seeing any Display Adapter) UNTIL you try to install the appropriate driver, at which point XP installs the driver (whether it be for the GeForce 210 or the 6200LE) and all becomes well while on Win2K the driver either refuses to install (for the 210, saying that no suitable device is present) or installs but doesn't change the situation (for the 6200LE, perhaps because only newer nVidia drivers refuse to install if they don't see hardware that they recognize). Whereas Win7 sees the Display Adapter immediately (perhaps because Win7 already includes the appropriate driver for it and installs it as part of the Win7 installation).

If no one else here has used Win2K on an AMD 770/SB710 chipset perhaps it's just some peculiarity of that hardware. Or if everyone who has is also using an unofficially-enhanced Win2K installation perhaps that cures the problem in some unexpected manner (as I noted, I'm just running the HFSLIP 1.7.9 slipstream with no unofficial changes save for time zones since I haven't had time to become familiar with post-EOL unofficial updates that may be significant for me). I don't really NEED to run Win2K on this machine and if I did I could either run it at 800x600 resolution under Vgasave or run it in an emulator: it's just annoying not to understand why I can't get it working right when it seems I should be able to.

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Actually I had Windows 2000 installed on Foxconn A76ML-K 3.0 (AMD® 760G + SB710). I didn't experience any problems related to graphic cards (I used two - the integrated one + external one).

You may want to try installing UURollup-v9b. I doubt it will help in solving this particular problem but it's the easiest way to install almost all unofficial updates at once. If it doesn't help then at least you'll be sure the problem is not related to system updates.